Work Song - Ivan Doig [36]
I went still. Was I in for another grilling about whether I was an IWW secret operative? What was I supposed to do, march around Butte wearing a sandwich board that read I AM NOT A WOBBLY?
“If it’s about an unfortunate event in the library a while back,” I fended as I settled across the kitchen table from her, “that was sheerly a case of mistaken—”
“It’s church,” she announced, rolling her eyes. “There’s talk. About us. ‘Ye and me,’ ” and she did not a bad imitation of the wee Welsh preacher. Griff had been asked to fill in with the choir a few more times, and the two of us and Hoop duly had made command performances as audience. What was wrong with that? Answering my inquiring look, Grace fanned with a hand as if brushing away pests. “What some of the nosy ones around the neighborhood are saying is”—she reddened at the exact words—“I’m taking up with a boarder. The old biddies.”
Gossip, forever the whisper in the wind. “Mmm,” I met Grace’s report with uncertainty.
“Morrie?” Her violet eyes took in mine, a test that wouldn’t go away. “Do you feel, um, taken up with?”
“I am about to fork over my week’s rent,” I said, unsure of how much honesty beyond that was a good idea just then. “That tends to put matters in a certain perspective.”
Carefully folding my money away into her apron pocket, she allowed: “It does, doesn’t it.” Still hesitant, she went on: “There’s the matter of appearances, though. A boardinghouse has to be extra careful not to be lumped in with—” She gestured off toward the fleshly neighborhood of Venus Alley.
Now Grace looked at me, but not quite straight at me. “So you know what this means. I’m sorry, but—”
I waited, dreading the prospect of trying to find any other lodging in Butte as cozy as this.
“—you’ll have to go to church just with Hoop,” she finished off her decree. Then bounced up to take out the perfectly roasted turkey.
REPRIEVED AT THE BOARDINGHOUSE, I could now busy myself learning the ins and outs of the library’s finances. Sandison’s style of bookkeeping had been what might be called extemporaneous, with occasional casual entries of Miscellaneous book purchases followed by sums that might well make a library trustee gulp. Trying to untangle his method, if that’s what it was, I finally spotted in the ledger pages of staff wages and hours his hole card, so to speak. Me. Counting up, I could see there was not quite as much staff as was budgeted for—always a position or two short—and he covered those gaps in service, and doubtless put what would have been the wages into that bland expenditure on books, by shuttling employees from job to job during the course of a day. That works until, say, the board of trustees’ president’s wife is kept waiting at the temporarily vacant genealogy desk. My arrival plugged a lot of slots. Shunting me from task to task as Sandison did took those burdens off the other staffers; on a ranch I believe I would have been called the choreboy. I didn’t mind; variety has always been more to my taste than its opposite. I even was growing fond of the diverse evening groups, catching the end of the discussion those nights when it fell to me to go back to the library and close up, enjoying the verbal volleying about Hamlet’s nervous condition or Wilson’s strategy at the Paris peace conference. (However, I prudently waited for the Gilbert and Sullivan clan to vacate entirely before I tended to the music stands, lest Dora Sandison pounce on me with some other demand.) And on a more daily basis, when needed at a desk, I happily stepped into that role of librarian as bartender of information. Presiding over shelves of intoxicating items, dispensing whatever brand of knowledge was ordered up, I am sure I poured generously. At least Sandison must have thought so, the morning he told me to get downstairs and fill in for Miss Runyon at the Reading Room main desk as she made her grand descent to prepare for story hour.
Elevated there